TechNote (Archived)

ColdFusion MX on Unix platform fails to start

Issue

On Unix platforms, the Macromedia ColdFusion MX server may fail to start. Instead, the following error will be returned:

 Starting Coldfusion MX...
		

	   There may be a few moments before you can access   the Coldfusion MX administrator.    This is normal.
		

	   There has been an error starting Coldfusion MX,   please check the logs.

The following entry gets written to the cfserver.log located in the cf_root/logs directory:

 su: No shell

Reason

When ColdFusion MX is started, the ColdFusion start script,cf_root/bin/coldfusion, executes an su command to switch to the $RUNTIME_USER defined in the script. The $RUNTIME_USER is the user account the ColdFusion process will run as, and is specified during the ColdFusion MX installation. If the $RUNTIME_USER account has no shell specified in thepasswd file located in /etc/passwd, ColdFusion will fail to start with the above error message.

Solution

Use the following steps to resolve the issue:

Determine if the $RUNTIME_USER account has a shell defined in /etc/passwd.

In the following example, the $RUNTIME_USER account is the "nobody" user account.
```
 cat /etc/passwd | grep nobody 
```
The above command outputs the following line from the /etc/passwd file.
```
 nobody:x:60001:60001::/:/sbin/noshell 
```
Make a back up copy of the passwd file.
Edit the passwd file to remove the noshell setting.

For the previous example, the new setting would appear as:
```
 nobody:x:60001:60001::/: 
```
Restart ColdFusion MX.